Irving Group of Companies

[1]

• Cavendish Agri Services
• Cavendish Farms[2] — includes both retail and foodservice divisions

  • Indian River Farms[3]
  • Riverdale Foods[4]

• Juniper Farms[5]

[6]

• CFM Service (amalgamation of Custom Fabricators & Machinists, Atlantic Quality & Technical Services, and Atlantic NDT Inc.)[7]
• Gulf Operators
• Irving Equipment (crane rental, heavy lifting, specialized transportation, pile driving and project management services)
• Irving Wallboard
• Kent Homes
• Kent Mobile Shelters
• Irving Wallboard
• Pumps Plus

JDI's Pulp & Paper Division includes the following forestry and forest product companies:[8]

• Irving Lumber & Value-Added Products
• Irving Pulp & Paper
• Irving Paper Ltd.
• Irving Tissue
• Irving Woodlands
• Lake Utopia Paper
• St. George Power — run-of-the-river hydroelectric facility

Irving Consumer Products includes several brand-name and private-label tissue products.[9]

Irving Consumer Products operates 5 tissue manufacturing plants: 3 in Canada (Saint John and Dieppe, New Brunswick, and Toronto, Ontario) and 2 in the United States (Fort Edward, New York and Macon, Georgia).[10]

• Irving Tissue (Royale, Majesta, Scotties (U.S.))
• Irving Personal Care — the only manufacturer of baby diapers and training pants in Canada[9]

JDI Integrated Logistics (formerly Irving Transportation Services) is the transportation and logistics division of the company, which owns several railroad networks in Maine and New Brunswick, as well as major trucking companies.[11]

• Atlantic Towing
• Midland[12]
  • Midland Transport
  • Midland Courier
  • Midland Logistics & Freight Brokerage
• New Brunswick Railway (NBM Railways)
  • New Brunswick Southern Railway Co. Ltd.
  • Eastern Maine Railway Co. Ltd.
  • Maine Northern Railway Co. Ltd.
• RST Industries
• Sunbury Transport
• Kent Line
• JDI Logistics
• Harbour Development

Irving Retail Services includes several retailer services and business-to-business suppliers.[13]

• Chandler
• Kent Building Supplies
• Universal Truck & Trailer (UTT) — Atlantic Canada's largest heavy duty and truck and trailer dealer
• Plasticraft Digital & Specialty Printing — full-service specialty and digital print provider
• Atlas Structural Systems — manufacturer of pre-engineered structural systems
• Industrial Commercial Supplies (ICS) — retailer of commercial and industrial building materials

JDI's Shipbuilding & Industrial Fabrication companies and facilities include:

• Irving Shipbuilding[14]
  • Bluenose Building
  • East Isle Shipyard
  • Halifax Shipyard
  • Marine Fabricators
  • Saint John Shipbuilding
  • Woodside Industries
• Fleetway, Inc.
  • Oceanic Consulting Corporation

• Protrans Personnel Services Inc.[15]
• Industrial Security Inc.
• Moncton Wildcats[16]

• Acadian Lines Ltd.
• SMT (Eastern) Ltd. Bus Lines
• Saint John City Transit
• Irving Industrial Rentals
• Lexi-Tech International
• Barrington Environmental Services
• Barrington Industrial Services
• Commercial Equipment
• Maritime Tire
• M.I.T.I (Xwave)
• Hawk Communications
• Steel and Engine Products Ltd.
• Scot Truck
• MITV (now CIHF-DT and CHNB-DT)
• CHSJ-TV (now CBAT-DT)
• Shelburne Ship Repair — sold to Mersey Seafoods in 2022[17]

Until 2022, J.D. Irving owned Brunswick News, the largest newspaper publisher in New Brunswick and owner of the province's three major newspapers. On 17 February 2022 Postmedia Network announced that it was buying BNI from the Irving company.[18]

• Telegraph-Journal (Saint John NB)
• Times & Transcript (Moncton NB)
• The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton NB)
• The Tribune (Campbellton NB)
• La Voix du Restigouche (Campbellton NB)
• The Bugle-Observer (Woodstock NB)
• Le Journal Madawaska (Edmundston NB)
• L'Étoile (various editions)

• Édition provinciale
• Édition La Cataracte (Grand Falls NB)
• Édition Chaleur (Bathurst NB)
• Édition Dieppe (Dieppe NB)
• Édition Kent (Bouctouche NB)
• Édition Péninsule (Shippagan NB)
• Édition République (Edmundston NB)
• Édition Restigouche (Campbellton NB)
• Édition Shédiac (Shediac NB)

• Kings County Record (Sussex NB)
• Miramichi Leader (Miramichi NB)
• The Northern Light (Bathurst NB)
• Here (Saint John NB, Moncton NB, Fredericton NB)

Irving companies are private companies; as a result, there is less public information available as there would be for publicly traded corporations. This lack of transparency has led to significant criticism regarding Irving business activities.[25]

Irving companies are often criticized for their vertical integration.[25] Examples of vertical integration within the "Irving Group of Companies" (as the Irving family refers to their holdings) include the acquisition or formation of businesses along the entire chain of production, from the Irving refinery (an Irving Oil subsidiary) and its retail outlets, to the transportation subsidiaries of J.D. Irving (RST, Midland, NB Southern, Sunbury), to various construction and engineering companies that assist in building, maintaining and expanding the conglomerate's facilities.

Further examples of vertical integration within the conglomerate include Industrial Security Ltd. (ISL), the wholly owned security company that guards facilities, as well as industrial suppliers such as Thornes, Universal Sales and Commercial Equipment Ltd. which provide specialty goods and services to its companies. J.D. Irving, the sister firm to Irving Oil, is a dominant forestry company in northeastern North America, growing trees, harvesting trees and producing lumber, pulp and paper, and various enhanced value products such as glossy paper grades, tissue, and personal care products.

The Dominion newspaper, an independent Canadian newspaper, has criticized Irving's ownership of Brunswick News, which published most newspapers in New Brunswick, as well as the newspapers' journalistic integrity, particularly when reporting on companies controlled by the Irving family such as Irving Oil.[26][27][28] Canadian Business magazine wrote in a profile of the Irving Group in 2008, "A Senate committee that recently probed media ownership in Canada expressed concerns about the family’s near-monopoly over the province’s print media and "the implications of a dominant media force linked to a dominant industrial base." While a Brunswick News official denied any pro-Irving bias in the papers’ coverage, the committee’s 2006 report cited other witnesses who feared that Irving journalists exercise restraint and self-edit when writing about the family — "unconscious loyalty to the parental control," as one put it."

In 2003, there were accusations of Irving family political patronage, notably involving Allan Rock and Claudette Bradshaw of the Liberal Party of Canada.[29] In 2016, the National Observer released an eight-part investigation on the family called House of Irving. It looked at many parts of the businesses including the expansion into Maine, its media monopoly, how they intimidate their critics and issues within the family.[30]

The J. D. Irving pulp & paper mill in Saint John.

Irving-owned facilities have been shown to emit a mixture of carcinogens, including benzene and lead. In 2009, the Conservation Council of New Brunswick produced a study which found that rates of lung cancer were 40 to 50 percent higher in Saint John than in Fredericton and Moncton – New Brunswick’s other major cities.[31][32] In 2018 the Irving Pulp and Paper Ltd. pleaded guilty to three charges under the federal Fisheries Act related to numerous "significant" instances of effluent discharges from its pulp mill in west Saint John into the St. John River over a two-year period.[33] This was the fourth time that this fine was issued in a period of two years.[34]